Technical Service vs Service Offering

[Moe9]

Hello,

Is it a MUST to map Technical Services (TS) to Technical Service Offerings (TSO) and THEN map them to Application Services (AS)? Is it possible to have TS mapped directly to an AS (i.e. not have a TSO)? Any pitfalls with taking this approach?

[Maik Skoddow]

Please take a look at the following document to understand better the relations between all service types and their relation to service offerings. Then you will see that your question makes no sense: https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/success/quick-answer/... 

And to make it short: Service Offerings are pretty important in ServiceNow and shouldn't be skipped. Otherwise some OOTB functionalities will not work correctly.

[Andreas Borell]

The answer is that the CSDM tells you that you should have offerings, so you should have offerings, and not spend time trying to break the system.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/washingtondc-servicenow-platform/page/product/csdm-implementation...

[Barry Kant]

Hi Moe, 

where a Service defines the type of service you deliver the service offering is flavors of this service. Service Offerings links eg to OLA, UC, and other commitments and relates the supporting parties. The way I understand it is that your support model is maybe less granular and that might result in 1 service --> 1 service offering and that feels like overhead. 
Service Offerings links the Services to the CIs in a dynamic way using Dynamic CI Groups. This syncs those parties to the related CIs (so that saves administration). On the other side, DPM is relating Services in a Service Portfolio. The consumers of Service Offerings are made by Subscriptions. 
Those are a handful ootb functions of the combination service-service offering. If deviating from this than data model concept then you will not be able to use such functions. (it blocks feature adoption)

From a step-by-step option it might be possible to first start with services only, but it is not a sustainable choice if you ask me.
What are the main concerns on your side?
BR,
Barry

[Moe9]

Appreciate your response Barry. To answer your question, one of our teams has been working with a  product called 'Ardoq' to capture Business & Technical capabilities. They want to transition off of this, and on to ServiceNow, however, the challenge they have is "how to map Ardoq's Technical Capabilities to the ServiceNow CSDM?". After several discussions with Ardoq they've come to the conclusion that ServiceNow simply doesn’t have the equivalent concept of 'Technical Capabilities'. The closest comparison seems to be Technical Services, but they say "that there are enough differences between these model entities that it would be problematic to treat them as the same". In Ardoq they map Technical Capabilities directly to Applications, very similar to Business Capabilities. Whereas it seems CSDM Technical Services map to Technical Service Offerings, which then map to Application Services. According to them, this isn’t necessarily bad, but if those middle entities become a pre-requisite to using Technical Services then that could add significant complexity/delays!

So that in a nutshell is the challenge - which makes me think that Technical Capabilities (Ardoq), don't really map to Technical Service (CSDM) to begin with - and will need to be solutioned differently. Have you come across this type of scenario before?